My wild rocket always grows so quick I cannot keep up. In no time, a bunch of them are seeding and another bunch has grown woody. I try to keep them trimmed as then they produce the biggest and most beautiful leaves. As soon as they grow too woody, they only produce tiny and small leaves. So, it was time for a haircut.
There are two great benefits for me to this hard trimming:
I get the plants to drop their seeds, so there is not direct need from me to sow new seeds; and
I get a bunch of free salad leaves, so I can make the most delicious salads.
The downside of it all is that I need to trim the leaves by hand, and as they have already went to seed, the whole table is left full of seeds!
Luckily, I had my fiance to help me harvest all of the leaves.
We sat around the dinner table, picking all of the small leaves from the vast amounts of harvested rocket. But it was fun!
In the end, we did not have the biggest pile of leaves in the world, because many of them were so small. But in the end, we did make the most wonderful salad! It tasted even better because of the hard work we put into harvesting the leaves.
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After harvesting all of these leaves, and having the best salad, I also started with the process of sifting and sieving the salad rocket seeds which I harvested about two to three months ago.
So, they had almost three months now to try out, and they were dried out completely! There is not a bit of water left in them.
I have a very primitive or "hand made" way of cracking open every seed pod. I take a big bucket in which I dried these seed pods out.
Then I take a big piece of wood, and I bash the seed pods against the sides of the bucket and with the end of the piece of wood. This successfully breaks all of the seed pods open.
It is really not the best way of doing it, but it is quick and easy, taking less than 20 minutes in total to break open most of the seed pods.
Now that I have the seed pods open and broken, I also have a very basic setup of removing the empty seed pods and stems from the seeds. If you break open the seed pods you will have to ends of the seed pod, a thin film that is between the seeds, and some stems. I use a very old colander that my mother threw out many years ago, as the openings are just big enough for the seeds to fall through, leaving behind all of the seed pods and films, and stems.
In the end, my system kind of works. It is not perfect.
I do not eat the seeds, so I do not care that much that the seeds are not 100% clean.
I will store these next to the thousands of other seeds that I also harvested throughout the years. It always amazes me how much you can harvest from such humble and small growing spaces.
I hope that your garden will also yield you so much!
For now, happy gardening and keep well.
All of the musings and writings are my own, inspired by the hard work in the garden. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300.